Impact of Social Media
in Healthcare and Telemedicine
B y Yv o n ne Pr i c e o n
November 20, 2014
Social media and health care
Did you know that there are more than
75,000 health care professionals on
Twitter? That 41 percent of consumers
are using Facebook, Twitter, YouTube
and online forums to select health care
providers? Or that social media can help
track the spread of fast-moving illnesses
like influenza?
When you think of social media in health
care, you might think it’s all about
marketing. But experts agree, it goes
beyond that.
Farris Timimi, medical director for the
Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media,
said that social media in health care is a
“moral obligation.”
“Our patients are there. Our moral
obligation is to meet them where
they’re at and give them the
information they need so they
can seek recovery,” Timimi
said. “This is not marketing;
this is the right thing to do.”
If it’s the right thing to do
for doctors, nurses and
other health care providers,
then it makes sense for
telemedicine providers too.
After all, telemedicine is all
about the innovative use of
communication technology to
improve patient care.
Consumers and Providers
Pretty much everyone agrees
that patients and consumers
were first to the table. They
were using social media for
health research, sharing and
decisions before health care
professionals finally arrived
and joined the conversation.
With a reported one third
of consumers looking to
social media for medical
information, it seems like
a pretty good place for
providers of all sorts to be
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sharing that info. And now they are, in
ever increasing numbers.
In March 2014, Creation Pinpoint
published a video analysis of the growth
of worldwide health care professionals
on Twitter between 2006-2014. This very
cool interactive video allows you zoom
in on any place in the world and drag
the timeline back and forth to see the
growth explode before your eyes.
Data, Data, Data
When it comes to analyzing
the data to find
out
exactly what health care professionals
are doing on social media, it’s not easy.
In Greg Matthews’ article, Physician use
of Twitter: Examining the data, he points
to a study by Dr. Katherine Chretien as
the first of its kind to really dig into the
meat of what physicians are actually
doing and saying on Twitter.
Not surprisingly, there is no
equivalent